1. Field
The present invention relates generally to computer systems and, more specifically, to initialization and management of servers having multiple processors.
2. Description
Computing systems are becoming increasingly complicated. as computing systems include more processors, more sockets, and more intricate interconnect schemes, initialization processing becomes burdensome and time consuming.
For server systems having multiple processors, such as 4-way and 8-way systems (without loss of generality), for example, the time and effort to determine the valid network of processors within the fabric during system initialization processing is growing. In some computing systems, significant portions of this increased initialization processing have been pushed to the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware for handling. Implementing system topology discovery tasks using the BIOS to query processors over the system interconnect is inefficient, but necessary in current systems. As computing systems expand to even higher numbers of processors and server components on the fabric, this expanding initialization processing time and effort negatively impacts performance of system booting.